In a semiconductor device manufacturing process, there has been used a probe apparatus configured to perform an electrical inspection on a semiconductor device formed on a semiconductor wafer. In such a probe apparatus, there has been used a probe card in which multiple probes in contact with multiple electrode pads on the semiconductor wafer are provided.
Further, this probe card is provided at a card clamp device of the probe apparatus, and the semiconductor wafer is adsorbed and held on a wafer mounting table, and the wafer mounting table is moved by a driving device. Thus, electric conductance can be obtained by bringing the probes of the probe card into contact with the electrodes of the target semiconductor device on the semiconductor wafer. Then, an electrical inspection is carried out to the target semiconductor device by supplying an inspection signal to the target semiconductor device from a tester via the probes and by measuring signals from the target semiconductor device (see, for example, Patent Document 1).
The wafer mounting table of the probe apparatus adsorbs and holds the semiconductor wafer with a vacuum chuck. For this reason, on a mounting surface of the wafer mounting table, for example, multiple circular vacuum chuck grooves are concentrically formed with equal spaces therebetween. Further, the semiconductor wafer is adsorbed on the mounting surface by evacuation through a vacuum path connected to these vacuum chuck grooves.
Recently, a semiconductor wafer has been thinned, and in order to make it easy to handle such a thinned semiconductor wafer, there has been used a so-called “Taiko wafer” including an annular portion which has a larger thickness and is formed at an outer peripheral portion on a rear surface thereof and the other thin portion having a thickness smaller than that of the annular portion (see, for example, Patent Document 2). Such a semiconductor wafer including the annular portion having a large thickness and the thin portion having a small thickness is likely to be bent since the stiffness of the thin portion is low as compared with the typical semiconductor wafers, and the annular portion and the thin portion are remarkably different from each other in the stiffness. For this reason, if such a semiconductor wafer is mounted on a wafer mounting table of a probe apparatus to be adsorbed and held thereon, it is difficult to uniformly adsorb the entire semiconductor wafer unlike a case of adsorbing and holding the typical semiconductor wafer.